In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.
OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.
Many adjunct professors are people who have full-time jobs doing something else. A friend of mine did this one semester to make some extra money. He worked full-time as a structural engineer, but took a long lunch three days a week to teach Introduction to Statics at the university we both attended. He said it was fun to do for one semester, but he computed that he was only making about $10/hour when you included the time to prepare for lectures and grade papers.
In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.
Some people Adjunct to improve their resume too. NYU's school of continuing education has a lot of underpaid adjuncts who get residual benefits for the prestige of being NYU faculty. But nobody lives in Manhattan on NYU adjunct salary alone.
Oh no! I didn't mean to imply a good living, just that those numbers make sense. But as has been pointed out, the school she was at was likely charging a lot more than $200/student.
OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.